Secretary Ben Diokno is someone I hold in high regard. We were once on the same panel that took up the issue of the Priority Development Assistance Fund and Disbursement Acceleration Program when these were still the “disputed questions” of our fickle times. Secretary Leonor Briones was also on the panel— and, thankfully, we were all in agreement that we could not agree with “lump sum” appropriations for legislators’ purposes and for Executive distribution as largesse to favored legislators. Beware of lumps, warned the respected Leonor Briones—of whatever kind they might be! But I am disturbed now that our Budget Secretary tells the nation that there is no money for free tuition in higher education. I feel personally dismayed because I went through eight campuses of the Cagayan State University, at the behest of our University President, setting in place the mechanism for free tuition, even if we had earlier been warned that there was no guarantee that the program would outlive 2018. Now, it seems, it may even have a shorter life span! As my brother says, whenever he is disappointed: “How sad!”
Earlier, when the Legislature took up the issue of subsidizing higher education, one legislator attempted to justify serious budget cuts on state universities and colleges by forwarding a patently false dilemma: What would you rather spend on, he asked: Basic education or higher education? I told myself then, as I tell myself—and others now who might care for my thoughts: Why should we even have to make that choice? The expected answer is of course, because there is not enough money to go around. But that just begs the question about where the money goes—and then the whole, endless but important debate about budgetary priorities surfaces once again.
Without a doubt, basic education must be amply provided for. But it should never be a choice between basic and higher education. Public elementary and secondary schools are possible only when there are enough qualified and competent teachers, and it is higher education that provides the teaching force for basic education. Starve higher education and you emaciate basic education as well. It is true of course that there are more private higher education institutes than there are state universities and colleges, but this only proves that the government has not been doing a very good job at fulfilling the Constitutional mandate to provide for a complete system of education. I am by no means advancing the patently controversial proposition that the state should bear the whole burden of higher education—although in countries such as Germany, Belgium and, for some time, I understand, even Spain, all higher education is state-funded education. (And so, the proposition is really not absurd at all!)
It bolsters the cause for higher education to remember that expertise in the “hard sciences”—physics, chemistry, biology (in all its permutations)—including mathematics is the handiwork of higher education. And these disciplines, it has repeatedly been pointed out, offer a route to national advancement. Sound policy making, whether in business or in government, will not be supplied by the craftsmanship that Grades 11 and 12 in some of their strands provide. Only higher education offers careers in sociology, economics and politics and it is the graduates of these programs that become policy-makers (or at least should be, were clowns not chosen in their stead!). And if both private enterprise and national economies are nurtured by high-level research in a data-driven world, then there is no way that we should beggar higher education.
Were the social divide narrower, then there would be force in the argument that quality education must be paid for. Undoubtedly, quality has its costs. The question is who picks the tab? Having been with a state university for a considerable span of my professional life, I know that many sit in our swelteringly hot classrooms and perform experiments in our sometimes ramshackle laboratories who are really tremendously gifted people. (Without a doubt, a state university has its own generous share of crackpots and fools who waste the time and the resources of State). And many of them would never be able to afford the costs of private higher education in universities or colleges that truly make a difference. It has often been pointed out—sometimes in an effort to discredit government-funded higher education—that it costs more to school a student in a state university than in an average private higher education. And to that my riposte will be a firm, unhesitating, unapologetic: Of course! The experts engaged by the University of the Philippines, for one, would be beyond the reach of even elitist universities and colleges—that have their doors shut tightly anyway to students whose parents have shallow treasure-chests (if any, at all!). Even a state university in the province pays its professors considerably more than its private counterparts—which is the reason that it will attract more qualified members of its professorial corps.
I really have no ready answer to the admittedly complicated question of the wherewithal for free higher education. (By the way, what was under consideration was free tuition—which allowed state universities and colleges to collect miscellaneous fees.) But I am sure that we should not have to make a choice between funding basic education and allowing the penniless into our state universities and colleges. In fact, we should gradually be moving in the direction of studying vouchers for even private higher education where state education is unable to meet the need. Increasing allocations for “intelligence”, for one, should be looked into, because while there is no doubt that we do need effective and helpful intelligence, more fundamental a need is seeing to an intelligent nation by an ungrudging support of higher education!
